A “Staying Alive” Museum

Last week, I made an online and somewhat anonymous contribution to the Goldring Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life. I had heard about the group from a college classmate from Mississippi with whom I shared stories of growing up Jewish in the South. Now, I want to be more outright in my support of the organization’s work because I am sure they will use my money well.

The ISJL started out as the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience in the mid 1980s.  That sounds like a place that houses old papers and pictures of a dying culture. It doesn’t sound like an organization that’s alive and growing or one focused on a culture that is alive and growing. Which all sounds pretty pessimistic to me. Luckily, the organization chose to expand its mission. Here is how it describes the current mission on its website:

“Today, the Institute provides rabbinic services to small congregations across the region. It has developed a comprehensive religious school curriculum and support program that is being used by over 75 congregations in thirteen states. The History Department works to preserve and interpret the rich legacy of the southern Jewish experience.  Its Encyclopedia of Southern Jewish Communities offers detailed histories of over 200 Jewish communities and congregations in the South. The ISJL also sponsors a range of cultural programs throughout the region.”   

So why is this important to me?

My paternal grandfather came to this country in the early 1900s and settled in the Deep South, traveling across the region from Mississippi, to Louisiana, to Texas, to Arkansas. He was not a deeply religious man, from what I am told, but he had his own way of keeping Judaism alive. He was a peddler and a butcher by trade. He slaughtered and cut up meat for a living, and the meat he used in his own household was slaughtered in a kosher way. It was one important vestige of Judaism that he tried to maintain.

This is the one picture I have of
my grandfather as a young man.

He eventually settled with his wife and most of his 12 children in the tiny town of Calion, Arkansas, not far from the semi-booming metropolis of El Dorado, probably in the mid to late 1920s. According to the entry on El Dorado in the ISJL’s Encyclopedia of Southern Jewish Communities, the city became a boom town in the 1920s when oil was discovered there. The boom led a number of Jewish merchants to come to El Dorado to open stores, deal in real estate, and establish oil-related businesses.

Now, it is important to know the luck of my family when it comes to oil. I can remember visiting my aunt, uncle, and cousins in the late 1950s in the unlikely-named town of Oil City, Louisiana, near Shreveport. Looking out from their backyard I could see oil well, oil well, oil well, then my uncle’s property, then oil well, oil well. What’s wrong with this picture?  I am told that if I had visited my Aunt Libby in Kilgore, Texas, I would have seen a similar plethora of oil wells with a blank space on her property. And my mother says my grandfather suffered a similar plight on his land near El Dorado. It seems that we Goodmans were destined not to get rich quick (or even rich at all).

While he failed to prosper, my grandfather did continue to practice his brand of Judaism. He must have had a decent voice because he often served as Cantor for the High Holidays in El Dorado’s Ohev Zedek congregation. Sadly, that congregation slowly died out and was disbanded for good in 1936. My grandmother died in 1937, and my father left the El Dorado area to move in with his brother in Oil City. Three years later, he arrived as a serviceman in Savannah, where he met my mother and settled down. Like his father, my father was not a religious man, but he always hosted a Friday night dinner, observed the holidays, and supported my mother in establishing and maintaining a kosher home all of his adult life. 

My father’s story was not typical of his siblings. Only two other children in his family married Jewish spouses and only one other—that uncle in Oil City—brought up his children as Jews. Intermarriage and the malaise of Judaism in the Delta took their toll. Other small branches of my father’s family in the Greenville, Mississippi, area did manage to keep Judaism alive. And there is a family legend told of my Aunt Fannie Schwartz who used to invite Jewish servicemen in the Greenville area during World War II to come to Friday night dinner, often entertaining as many as 20 for a mostly kosher meal. (My aunt always brought her own kosher plate and kosher food to luncheons in Greenville and went to Memphis periodically to get the kosher meat she kept in her own personal deep freezer.)

Which brings me back to the ISJL and its mission. There are still a large number of very small Jewish communities spread out in small and large towns in the Deep South. Providing support to these communities for simchas and sad occasions, offering information on Jewish history and learning, and providing a means to store elements of our own history is so very important. So I decided to make a small monetary contribution, and to write this blog post to perhaps stir others to find out more about the organization, and to continue my efforts to learn and write more about my family’s Jewish roots so my children can have something to hold on to and something important to add to their own foundation. 

A Statement of Unity

Some people think back to the good moments in their lives, and that is what stays with them. I usually recall the not-so-good moments or the not-so-admirable deeds. It is that mode of thinking that brings to mind the time I felt the most insulted in my life. And that, ironically, is what I am thinking about on this Martin Luther King Day.

It occurred during my junior year in college. I was part of a committee appointed to choose a Graduate Fellow to live and work in Pierson, my residential college at Yale. The man we were interviewing was the leader of the Black Law Students Association at Yale. He was a dynamic and somewhat belligerent individual from Atlanta. As a fellow Georgian, I wanted to make a personal connection with the man and asked if he had worked on campaigns to elect Maynard Jackson as a senator in Georgia or as the first African American vice mayor of Atlanta. (Three years later, in 1973, Jackson was elected as Atlanta’s first black mayor.) I noted that I had done what I could in Savannah to raise both money and awareness for Jackson. Surely, the law student and I had a common experience here. Right? Not really.

His response set me way back on my heels. “You upper middle class white people had time for campaigning and raising money from other rich people,” he said. “I was too busy trying to make enough just to get myself to college.”

He was wrong on so many counts in his statement, but I was too stunned to challenge him. I just let the sting sink in. I even felt guilty hearing his words, even though my financial aid needs to attend Yale were probably nearly as great as his.

The memory of that insult brings to mind images of the changing black-white dynamic in my life in Savannah, Georgia, in the 1950s and 1960s—my growing up years.  Here is what I remember:

• Buses with signs that read “Colored Seat from Rear”
• Separate water fountains near public building for whites and “coloreds”
• When those signs disappeared in my late elementary school years
• Overhearing a barber cutting my hair when I was about eight or nine lament to the adults in the shop that he might soon have to drink water from the same fountain as “the coloreds”
• My being literally raised by our African American maid Louise (which was not exactly a scene out of the book or movie The Help) and my shock at seeing the conditions where she lived when my father and I drove her home one night. (This. I am sure, had an impact on my later political thinking.)
• The desegregation of my junior high and senior high schools and our sports leagues
• The amazement and jealousy we white students felt when our school basketball team played its first games against primarily black schools and we watched Beach High’s cheerleaders and fans rock to cheers such as “Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey, Big B, you look so good to me!” I think the Savannah High fans, with little rhythm, responded with something like “Hey, hey, hey, hey, Big S, we know you are the best.” Lame!
• The lunch counter at Kresses becoming a hot bed of protest by both blacks and whites in 1962, and my vociferously defending the rights of blacks to sit at that counter (and my amazement today to see that store be an integral part of the Savannah’s reborn downtown that has occurred through the impact of the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD)
• Arguments in school and at B’nai Brith Youth Organization meetings, where we raised money and helped distribute pro-Civil Rights materials
• The deaths of Schwerner, Goodman, and Cheney in Mississippi and my pride as well as concern that the two whites were also Jews
• My disgust when the buses of accelerated students like me attending American Legion-sponsored Boys State were greeted by racist gubernatorial candidate Lester Maddox (who would be elected governor the following year through a series of strange political circumstances)
• My extreme sadness at the deaths of both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy in 1968 and additional sadness that Hubert Humphrey, who had stood up for Civil Rights long before Lyndon Johnson or so many other politicians, would be vilified during the 1968 elections, when I believed that he was the best person to help heal our troubled country
• My confusion in reading a Time magazine cover story entitled “Black vs. Jew” in January 1969 and wondering what could be causing such a rift between two groups of people who should be bonded in their joint oppression

• My being insulted by a puffed up black law student who didn’t know my history and decided to stereotype me when he thought I was stereotyping him

These are my good and my bad memories of those times. I am not proud of all of them, but they are strong in my mind.

All of this seems a little heavy to me, so I’ll end with my favorite black-white bonding moment, which happened not to me but to my wife’s cousin Lou Walter. Lou ran a successful dental supply business for many years and prided himself on remembering and caring about every customer. Once, while walking through JFK Airport, Lou spotted a distinguished African American man who looked very familiar to him. Certain he had spotted a former customer, Lou approached the man with outstretched hand, calling out “Hi, Lou Walter, Walter Dental Supply.” Somewhat taken aback, the man took Lou’s hand and countered, “Hi, Andrew Young, United Nations.” Lou was not at all embarrassed by the incident. He was proud of the connection he had made to a new friend, the UN ambassador.

That handshake is my statement of unity to commemorate this Martin Luther King Day.

Searching for Roots

I have been thinking about my family history lately. Visiting with many family members in Savannah over the winter holidays often does that to me. Plus, my daughter Amanda connected with several of our relatives this week while on a trip to Israel, learning how Israel’s major companies function and the value of conducting business activities with Israelis. Amanda said she also felt a stronger connection to her Jewish identity as a result of her trip to Israel. That’s not hard to understand.

But onto family history, after one more digression. . . .

I recently read a book of essays by Eli Evans entitled The Lonely Days Were Sundays. Evans is a chronicler of Jewish life in the South, especially during the period between 1900 and the 1970s. The title of his book comes from a comment that Evans’s grandmother had made about the difficulties of being Jewish and surrounded by non-Jews in a small Southern community, in this case Durham, North Carolina. Here is the whole quote:

“The lonely days were Sundays—Sundays when I watched the town people going to church, while we stayed upstairs in our apartment. Then I would feel like an outsider in this little community. I would have hunger in my heart for my own people. I would visualize a Utopia—a village like this of all Jews—going to a temple on the Sabbath.”

A few pages into the book, Evans quotes a Jewish scholar and rabbi named Jacob Rader Marcus, who asserts that “no Jew was ever the first person to go anywhere. There was always a cousin or an uncle ahead of him.”  So it has been with my family.

Both my grandfather and his sister, the grandmother of my cousins in Israel, were born in a strong Jewish community in Brest-Litovsk, Poland, in the late 1800s. My grandfather came to America in the early 1900s, where his older brother had already settled. The older brother had entered the country at Ellis Island and had proceeded to Savannah, Georgia, where some cousins were already settled. How and why did they get to Savannah? I just don’t know. My grandfather eventually joined them in Savannah in 1911, bringing his fiancée (my grandmother) along. They soon married and became Southern Jews, with a Polish accent.

My cousin Yosi (Joseph) in Jerusalem filled in some information about my grandfather’s remaining three siblings, one of whom was his grandmother. They all stayed in Brest until the mid 1920s. His grandmother married and worked with her husband in the family’s farm equipment business. Then, one day in 1926 or 1927, a customer in the store began spouting anti-Semitic remarks. The husband took offense and hit the customer in the head with a piece of farm equipment, injuring but not killing the man. Fearing for their lives, the Jewish couple decided to immigrate to Palestine, of all places. In 1927, that was not an easy decision to make. They became Halutzim (pioneers) and worked to help build what would eventually become the state of Israel. They would also begin a new branch of my family, whose last name was Volovelsky before World War II and was eventually changed to Laor (“the light” in Hebrew) several years after the war and after Israel became an official country in 1948. The delay in changing the name was because my cousin Eli determined not to make the change until he was sure that no relatives remained who might have survived the Nazi occupation of Poland and might come looking to reconnect with him in Israel using the Volovelsky name.

Halutzim from Eastern Europe in the 1930s

Sadly, the two siblings who remained in Brest, and the rest of the family members, were taken to concentration camps and slaughtered during the Holocaust. We know their exact dates of death, thanks to the efficient recordkeeping of the Nazis.

This is what I know about the movement of my mother’s side of my family. My father’s side’s history is a little bit sketchier. I am told that my grandfather and grandmother came into the U.S. via either Galveston or New Orleans. They were from either Odessa in southern Russia or Lebanon (my sources do not all agree on this). The man who sponsored my grandfather was named Goodman, and so he chose that as his American name, too. [The original name was something like Byall, which would probably go over well in the South but be confusing, as y’all can imagine.] 

European Jews enter U.S. at Galveston in 1907

My grandfather, whose name was also Michael, became a peddler—like so many immigrant Jews in both the South and North—and moved from place to place. The family of two adults and 12 children made their home in small towns in the South, where they constituted the entire Jewish population. How strange that must have been for them and for their neighbors! Their homes included such “metropolises” (metropoli?) as Anguilla, Mississippi (pop. <800), where my father was born, and Calion, Arkansas (pop. <Anguilla’s), where my father spent his high school years. I will write more about those places in another blogpost, and about their lives as Jews.

Which takes me back to the Evans book for one more thought. Evans said he is often asked to describe the differences between Jews in the North and Jews in the South.  (I am asked that, too, since I have lived in both worlds.) He notes that, unlike Jews in the New York area in particular, Southern Jews have always existed as a minority in a majority culture. They have generally found the need to bond tightly with each other to establish and maintain an identity as Jews. In Evans’s words, “My generation of Northern Jewish friends were upwardly mobile; we [Southern Jews] wanted roots.”

The desire for roots took my immediate ancestors from their ancestral homes to the United States (North and South) and to Israel. There are no written records of their journeys, so I figure I should take on the task as best I can for now and look for help to fill in the gaps.